A surprising amount of support organizations I work with, large and small, make do with a pretty basic ticket routing workflow. They may be utilizing a round robin distribution system, a first in first out approach, or maybe they’ve created a few rudimentary tiers based on customer type.

The appeal of these approaches is that they’re easy to set-up and simple to maintain. However, more complex workflows, based on a fine grained classification of incoming tickets, create a number of powerful opportunities for support teams to deliver an even better customer experience.

1. Improved Agent Training

Adequately training a new customer support rep on a new product is hard. Siloing tickets by issue type, product, priority and complexity allows you to train agents piecemeal, graduating them through different queues as they develop mastery of the previous ticket grouping.

Because agents are only biting off a little bit at a time, as opposed to trying to stuff the entire range of potential customers issues down their throat at once, they’ll be more confident, more consistent, and will also deliver faster responses.

From an efficiency perspective, this approach has the added bonus of shortening the unproductive period between when you hire an agent and when they go live.

2. Improved Consistency and Efficiency

Context switching occurs when agents handle wildly disparate issue types back to back. The mental gymnastics required to context switch lengthens the time it takes for an agent to solve a customer’s issue and can also negatively affect the consistency of that agent’s responses.

Agents solving similar issues in a sequence will be much faster, but will also deliver higher quality answers.

3. Agile Queue Management

Fine segmentation of incoming tickets allows support leaders to be much more flexible in their approach to triage.

For example, if there’s a temporary spike in the volume of high priority, high value tickets, a manager can adjust staffing to accommodate the spike and make sure those tickets get fast responses.

In a less sophisticated workflow, there’s a real risk that the most pressing issues from your most valuable customers can be inadvertently deprioritized by being left to rot in the queue.

4. Agent Specialization

Some tickets are going to require your most experienced agents, and even within that pool, there may be agents that are uniquely qualified to best handle those issues.

Formalizing those workflows and queue definitions helps ensure that less qualified agents are not attempting to respond to tickets beyond their skill level, which improves efficiency as well as the overall quality of responses customers are receiving.

Learn more about Wise Support in action by downloading our ThredUP case study.